Hut site, Baile Na Habha, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Baile Na Habha, Co. Kerry

On the lower western slopes of Brandon Mountain in County Kerry, a set of low stone mounds marks what was once a rather more purposeful place.

The Ordnance Survey map labels some of these features as sheep-folds, but the reality is more layered than that tidy classification suggests. A few sections of outer wall face still survive, just enough to hint at the original shape of things, but the structures have been so thoroughly absorbed into the hillside that their former life requires a certain effort of imagination.

At the centre of the site is the faint outline of a cashel, a type of early enclosure built from dry-stone walling and typically associated with early medieval settlement and farming in Ireland. Only its bare circular plan remains discernible now. The mounds surrounding it, recorded as sheep-folds on the OS map, are thought to have originally served as hut-sites connected to the cashel, domestic or working structures that were later adapted for the more modest purpose of sheltering animals. It is a common kind of reuse in the Irish landscape, where earlier stonework was rarely wasted, simply reconfigured for whatever a later generation needed. The site is documented in J. Cuppage's 1986 archaeological survey of the Dingle Peninsula, Corca Dhuibhne, which catalogued the remarkable concentration of prehistoric and early historic remains across this part of Kerry.

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Pete F
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